Wall Street and Hillary Clinton: The risk Democrats run by embracing the “big tent” - from salon.com

[Douglas Carpenter]

New report shows that Wall Street is as ready for Hillary as it gets. Here's why that should make Democrats nervous

by Elias Isquith


(Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)

Yet if we’re to take the Politico piece on Clinton and Wall Street as any guide — and, coming as it does from former banker William D. Cohan, there’s reason we shouldn’t — it looks like that’s the approach the Clinton folks have decided to take. According to Cohan, Wall Street is almost giddy over the prospect of a Clinton candidacy, describing it with the kind of vacuous (and intensely ideological) “non-ideological” phrases that they used when rhapsodizing over Obama back in 2008. “Many of the rich and powerful in the financial industry,” Cohan writes, “consider Clinton a pragmatic problem-solver not prone to populist rhetoric.” Regardless of whatever she may say to win over Democrats, Clinton’s got a pass from these masters of the universe, Cohan reports, because “[n]one of them think she really means her populism.” The Street’s support is “rock-solid” and “not anything that can be dislodged based on a few seemingly off-the-cuff comments.”

As Cohan notes, despite their recently spotty record on wise investments, the Wall Streeters’ confidence in Clinton is pretty well placed. They already know her quite well from her years in the White House — years that were characterized by a wave of financial deregulations that came at quite a price for the rest of us, though they were doubtlessly beneficial to the 1 percent. And they know her better still from her brief stint as New York’s junior senator. Clinton and Wall Street, Cohan reports, are simply comfortable around one another. They go to the same parties (in the Hamptons) and travel in the same circles (among the financial, cultural and entertainment elite). She “understands how things work,” in the words of one Cohan source, who helpfully clarifies that, on the Street at least, “she’s not a populist” is what that means.

And the affinity is not just historical or cultural, either. Cohan finds that one of the reasons Wall Street is so gung-ho about Clinton 2016 is because it believes a second Clinton presidency would lead to progress on the issues that, in its eyes, matter most — namely, “fiscal and tax reform,” which is the elite’s favored euphemisms for cutting Medicare and Social Security as well as lowering taxes on corporations. “She will be trying to govern from the center with a problem-solving bent like her husband,” says Greg Fleming, the president of Morgan Stanley Wealth and Investment Management. Going unmentioned, of course, is the fact that the problems being solved in Wall Street’s imagination by a future President Clinton are currently only a significant concern among those in the 1 percent.

So if two years from now Democrats find themselves on the defensive, watching in horror as someone like John Kasich or Ted Cruz successfully labels Clinton as the candidate of the status quo and the 1 percent, they shouldn’t say no one saw it coming. In an era of populist anger and increasing polarization, there are downsides to having such a big tent.

http://www.salon.com/2014/11/12/wall_street_and_hillary_clinton_the_risk_democrats_run_by_embracing_the_big_tent/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

Elias Isquith is a staff writer at Salon, focusing on politics.

[LondonReign2]

1. Ayup

[Douglas Carpenter]

2. one more

[Scuba]

3. Neocons have figured out that a Republican cannot win in 2016 ...

... so they've infested our Party and plan to win as Democrats. This is not a new trend.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1251&pid=386593

[Douglas Carpenter]

4. capitalist power is realistic enough to know that it cannot always get absolutley everything it want

so they will settle for getting 90% of what they want. Wall Street is giddy about another Clinton presidency for a reason